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In 1965, at an institution that officially never existed, a Chair was established that only the secret service was supposed to know about. At the Juridical Academy in Potsdam near Berlin, "Operative Psychology" (OP) was taught for almost 25 years to over 13.300 trainees of the Secret Service (Stasi) in East Germany. An increasing number of academically trained psychologists taught concepts and techniques of OP, designed to systematize and support intelligence work:Starting out with only four members, the number of employees working at the institute for OP continually grew until it peaked at 10 in 1989. Besides holding lectures and seminars, members of the institute provided an extensive corpus of teaching material and training documents and supervised more than 200 diploma and doctoral theses (Richter, 2015).Their research focused on how to apply "silent" psychological techniques of persuasion and repression (e.g., how to urge citizens to cooperate and give private information to the secret service), how to interrogate dissidents without leaving physical marks, and how to "disintegrate" opposition groups and dissidents (Förster, 1996, p. 10). Although archival documents reveal a process of professionalization and academization of OP from the 1960s onward, the J Hist Behav Sci. 2018;54:43-61.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jhbs

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Abstract. The dark triad of personality (D3) – consisting of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism – is a set of socially aversive personality traits. All three traits encompass disagreeable behavior and a particular disregard for the well-being of others, but also a tendency to strategic and deceptive manipulation of social environments in order to attain one′s goals. To exercise these complex manipulations effectively it seems beneficial to have high cognitive abilities. Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted to examine possible relationships between intelligence and the dark triad. A total of 143 studies were identified to estimate the strength of relationships between the D3 and general, verbal, and nonverbal intelligence. The results indicate that none of the constructs of the dark triad are meaningfully related to intelligence. However, there was a small negative correlation between intelligence and Factor 2 psychopathy. The substantial heterogeneity regarding the observed effect sizes could not be explained with meta-regression for the most part. There was no evidence for a publication bias. In total, the results challenge the notion that the dark triad is an adaptive set of personality traits that enables individuals to effectively manipulate their social surroundings.